Jorman dreamed that he was in a crowded room full of people dressed in white. The air was hazy with incense and cigar smoke and the haze of dreams. He scanned the room, but found no familiar faces.
Jorman felt slow and tired, even though he was in a dream. A splash of color in the corner of the room caught his eye, and he moved towards it, gently weaving in and out of the crowd. The people around him bobbed and weaved, dancing to drummers that Jorman couldn't see. He arrived at the colorful corner - bright yellow in this white room, not from paint but from yards and yards of yellow and gold fabric that had been gathered and draped with great care over the walls and floor. Saffron-yellow satin, tulle embroidered with golden butterflies. Yellow rosebuds in golden vases, a statue of a woman looming over a rowboat. On the floor, a bowl of money, a bowl of oranges, a multitude of cakes iced in yellow and white and green and orange. Jorman took all of it in. The drumming across the room seemed to grow more insistent. He turned to crane his neck to look at the drummers and he saw Maja. Maja had died two weeks ago, in the world of not-dreams. She was young, so young; was about to turn twenty-eight. Her death had been sudden and shocking; Jorman had attended her funeral to support her brother, who had stared into the distance for the entire sad ceremony, tears streaming silently down his face. But here she was in this dream, alive and well, smiling and catching Jorman by the wrist, yellow satin tied around her head like a pirate's kerchief, her own wrists clanging with bangles. Maja also wore a white dress with a wide skirt, and it billowed around her as she danced to the drummers, who remained lost in the crowd. He tried to call to Maja, to say that he was so glad she was alive, to say that her brother would be so happy that there had been some kind of mistake. But his voice came out in a whisper. Maja cocked her head and put a hand to her ear, the sign for "repeat that?", but Jorman was adrift in the drumming and the dancing and the crowd on all sides of him, who sang in a language Jorman had never heard before, the language of the world of dreams. Suddenly Maja seized his arm tightly with both of her tiny hands - baby hands, her brother used to call her - and threw Jorman with the strength of a circus strongman. He landed directly under the canopy of yellow satin, the side of his head smashed into a cake. The crowd cheered, the drums pounded louder, and it sounded like a bell had been added to the drumming, but the bell was Jorman's alarm, snapping him suddenly back into the world of not-dreams, where Maja was dead and buried. *** Jorman lived alone, so he didn't know how there came to be a cake on his dining room table. He didn't even so much have a dining room. He lived in an efficiency apartment, and had a table where he ate all his meals, so we'll call it that just to make things easier. Nothing else was different about this table - his empty glass from yesterday still at his place, his wallet, his keys. Here there was, however, an exquisite cake. It was not iced in yellow or green or gold like the ones in his dreams. It was all white, with delicate piping around the edges, and on top were glistening strawberries arranged meticulously on tufts of white frosting. Jorman put his hand out to pluck a strawberry from the top of the cake, but his hand passed through the cake. I'm still dreaming, he thought, but then he stubbed his toe hard on the wooden legs of the table and he knew that he was wide awake. He tried again to touch the cake, but again his hand passed through it. Jorman sighed and started his coffee maker. *** A week later, the cake remained. It looked as delicious as before. The fruit flies that bothered Jorman's bananas every other week did not seem to notice the gleaming strawberries that topped the cake. Every day, Jorman looked at the cake - there was not much else in his apartment to look at - and every day, his hand passed through it like it was a ghost. On every other Wednesday, Jorman saw Maja's brother, Marquis. Jorman hadn't expected Marquis to want to come by so shortly after his sister's death, but Marquis insisted, saying that if he didn't force himself to leave the house he would just stare at the ceiling fan for hours. Jorman imagined Marquis, laying crucifixion-style on his bed, listening to the CDs he'd kept from cleaning out Maja's apartment, crying silently like he did at her funeral. I used to hate this music, man. But now it just reminds me of her. Jorman had even offered to pick up dinner this Wednesday, but again, Marquis had overruled him. It's my turn, Marquis had insisted, and although he was right, Jorman felt bad about it. Jorman was replaying the conversation in his head, thinking about how he could have and should have argued Marquis down, when a sharp rap at the door jolted him out of his own thoughts. It was Marquis, ten minutes late, carrying two bags of take-out balanced on a pizza box. "What's that?" Jorman asked, nodding his head at the pizza box as he took the bags from Marquis. "It's what they put the naan in now, man," grinned Marquis, opening the pizza box. "They gave me extra." Jorman unpacked the boxes, rice and curry and samosas, while Marquis rummaged in the fridge for a drink. Generally Jorman and Marquis ate at the table and then watched a movie or played a game. Jorman brought the take-out boxes to the table, but stopped short and stared. The cake was gone. "You alright?" Marquis asked. "Yeah," said Jorman. "It's nothing." "It smells nice in here," Marquis said. "Like strawberries. You got a girl now?" "Nah," said Jorman. He gingerly touched the table where the cake had been. Nothing. A dream. He looked at his friend, still present, still Marquis, even in his bottomless grief. Jorman smiled, a quick blink of a smile that disappeared before Marquis could look up from his bowl. "Let's eat."
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AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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